The United States and Japan will step up their defence cooperation to deal with the threat from nuclear-armed North Korea as tensions in East Asia remain high, officials from the two allies said on Thursday.

Defence examines security breaches

An unnamed defence official printed off secret images of asylum seeker boat operations, not to leak to the media, but to show friends what interesting work he or she did each day.

Then there was the stash of some 5000 confidential and secret defence documents inadvertently delivered to a Canberra commercial waste recycling facility in 2014.

A series of reports on Defence Security Agency investigations of security breaches, released under Freedom of Information, show the Australian Defence Force has its share of incidents.

However there's nothing remotely approaching US soldier Chelsea Manning's leaking of some 750,000 sensitive military and diplomatic documents to Wikileaks in 2010 (that we know of).

The most concerning incident appears to relate to a modification to a computer at the joint operations headquarters in 2013, resulting in omission of most audit events from the audit log for a period of some six months.

In theory that could conceal other activities on the computer, though the DSA reports give no indication anything improper occurred.

Neither could DSA say how this happened. Settings have now been restored and the number of senior staff with ability to make such changes has been reduced.

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In the case of the defence employee at northern command (NORCOM) headquarters in Darwin who printed off images of asylum seeker boat operations, DSA found no link between this "show and tell" and earlier leaks to the media.

DSA recommended the commander of NORCOM take appropriate action against the employee. There's no indication of what action was taken.

DSA identified various security vulnerabilities within NORCOM headquarters, though those aren't identified in the redacted public report.

In the case of the documents taken to the tip, DSA found minimal potential for disclosure, though there was a breach of proper disposal procedure. Documents related to defence pay and allowance proceedings dating back to 2002.

More recently, DSA investigated how some defence members managed to access some documentation relating to the yet to be released 2015 Defence White Paper.

Those interviewed said they believed they had a legitimate "need to know" and readily accessed the supposedly restricted white paper files on the defence computer system.